


Big Shot

by pentipus



Category: Cowboy Bebop, Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: M/M, Mild sexin', Slightly cutesy stuff, Spaceships, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-05-26
Packaged: 2018-01-26 15:36:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1693520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pentipus/pseuds/pentipus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cowboy Bebop/Achievement Hunter AU. Now that may sound totally random but give it a chance. It can work, I promise.</p>
<p>Basically, Gavin and Geoff are criminals living in the Cowboy Bebop-verse. Which is like a Western except it's set in space in 2071.</p>
<p>Oh also, con-crit is totally welcome!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Big Shot

Geoff liked to clean the guns because it gave him an excuse to sit in his room on his own, listen to some music and soak up the feeling of peace and well-being that he couldn't find elsewhere. He liked how the separate parts of the guns fitted together so nicely, he liked how it all just worked. Barrel, slide, receiver. All as they should be, spread out across his metal desk like a drawing of anatomy.

"We're famous now," Gavin has said breathlessly, not three months before, grinning so wide that Geoff could see the points of his incisors. Even through the dust of the explosions. "We'll have the Bebop after us now, I bet you."

They had escaped that time, up out of the vaults of the embassy they were trying to rob, because some bounty hunters only knew how to blow shit up, and that would never be enough to catch Geoff and Gavin.

Then sure enough, barely a day later, they were on Big Shot: "Gavin Free and Geoff Ramsey! These two cowpokes are a couple of genuine hijackers! 10,000,000 Woolongs each makes them a fine catch. If you can catch them that is. They've already outfoxed three of the best bounty hunters out there..."

So yeah, Geoff liked it when things were easy and when they flowed as they should. He liked to have some peace and quiet sometimes.

He picked up the loose barrel of the gun and turned it over in his hands, watching a spot of light move across the metal. He took a drag of his cigarette, blew the smoke out through his nose and said, "You found us then?"

"With some difficulty," said a voice behind him. A voice Geoff knew because Geoff was a criminal, and all good criminals knew _that_ voice. He heard the clackclick of a gun being cocked and the voice said, "You're going to have to come with me, Ramsey."

Geoff sighed as he stood up because this wasn't how it was supposed to be, on his own fucking ship, unarmed and helpless.

"Spike Spiegel, right?" Geoff held out a hand but Spike didn't take it. Instead he just did some sly, small smile and motioned towards the door with the gun.

"You know Gavin isn't on the ship," Geoff said as he walked into the hallway, the air conditioning making his skin prickle. "He went out to find you."

"Ironic, isn't it?" Spike said.

 

As far back as it was important to remember, Geoff had lived his life like a person handling an addiction: One step at a time, measuring the long moments between one high and the next. Those spaces like grey static.

When Geoff thought back to those times, it was like trying to remember a movie he had seen once. All the details were kind of blurred and the characters walking around were ones he didn't know and didn't care about. The only scene he ever really remembered was when Gavin Free's little blue MONO racer had crash-landed onto the wide deck of his ship. Smashing the shit out of everything Geoff had tagged as 'well-known', 'expected', 'routine'. Geoff always wondered how Gavin had managed to crash into a docked ship. But then, that was just Gavin, he supposed.

"Fuck, fuck, you can't report this." And man, Gavin had seemed so fucking young back then, dressed all in black and shitting himself about his stolen ship, that was at that point smoking pitifully on the deck of The Project. Gavin talking a mile a minute about the ISSP and how they had his picture on file because of some dumb drugs related shit he had done a couple of years ago. He’d seemed so helpless and so scared that Geoff had just kind of felt sorry for him. He had wanted to help him out.

So after the crash Gavin had slipped into Geoff's life like a square peg. He was always just there after that. After Geoff had assured him, "No, dude, I won't report it. I'm on their books too, you know." After he had transported Gavin back to Ganymede and helped him patch up his little stolen racer. Told him, Yeah, ok, you can stay here for a bit. But seriously, just for a little while.

Then of course 'a little while' turned into 'a long while' and Gavin turned out to be pretty fucking exhausting in the long run. In the beginning Geoff found himself constantly holding his breath when he was around, like he was a ticking bomb or something. And no matter how much Gavin managed to permeate into all the aspects of his life, Geoff never really managed to fully figure him out. It was as though there was some chasm of understanding between them, even when so much of their lives slid together so easily.

It wasn't until they started doing jobs together that Geoff began to realise that Gavin was more than just some misguided little dynamo, he was more than just someone to gauge his own actions by. Gavin was a fucking force of nature when it came to being a criminal. He was quick and smart and moved around exactly as he needed to, like he had a sixth sense for what Geoff wanted.

Gavin would plant home-made explosives on the cargo ships that they held up between gates, and when the shockwaves of the explosions rocked The Project as they flew away, Gavin would laugh excitedly, shouting, "Fuck, that was fun!"

 

That was how it was for a whole year. Maybe the longest period of semi-stability Geoff had ever known. He'd certainly never lived with anyone for that long since he had left home when he was thirteen, certainly never lived with another man longer than about three days. But Gavin was more like an extra limb than another person, and Geoff just got used to him. Even with the loud music and the weird food concoctions, the drunken urination in stage places around the ship and the girls he brought back whenever they were docked for more than a day.

But it was the jobs that Geoff really got used to. After a while he forgot how he ever managed on his own. It must have been so fucking dangerous back then, before Gavin Free was there to back him up. Shooting his mouth off and scaring the shit out of everyone whenever he and Geoff went to work.

This one time though, they robbed a bank on Venus and Gavin accidentally shot a woman in the side of the neck as they had stumbled out from behind the counters.

"Fuck! Fuck!" Gavin skidded across the floor and fell to his knees at the woman's side, his black slacks spreading her blood across the tiles. "Shit, Geoff--"

"Don't fucking say my name, dipshit!" Geoff was across the room in a second, fisting his hands in the back of Gavin's shirt and hauling him to his feet. "Get the fuck out of here. Get out!"

Afterwards Gavin couldn't stop shaking and when they heard on the news, "A woman was shot and killed during a bank robbery today--" he had ran to the toilet and thrown up, hunched over the bowl.

Geoff said nothing to help him, instead opting to let Gavin just ride out the guilt and the anger and whatever the fuck else he was feeling. He figured it was better that way, healthier for the mind. It was like flushing a poison out of your system.

He flew the ship to Earth, negotiating the asteroid belt like he was playing pinball, just like they had planned before it had all gone wrong there in the middle. Geoff knew that Gavin felt worse about the whole thing because the robbery had been his idea. All planned out to get the money to deliver to some guy that he owed back home. Some guy he assured Geoff was nothing to do with the syndicates. "Why the hell would some big crime lord be living on Earth, dodging rocks every day?" He had a point, Geoff supposed, but he still didn't really believe him.

They landed somewhere near London, where Gavin sat for a long time on the edge of a ridiculously huge empty crater, and stared out across the dusty air between him and what was once his home. It had all been underground then, from Reading to Oxford, stretching out East to encompass most of London. Gavin spoke about his days under the surface in a way that sounded oddly rehearsed, like he had a script written out in his head just in case anyone was ever actually interested to hear it. He told Geoff that he had lived under the surface until a month after his seventeenth birthday. And then just eight days after he had left he heard about the meteor that had hit Earth, one of the biggest yet, west of London.

Geoff sat on the deck of The Project and watched the still shape of Gavin in the distance for a long time before he eventually got up to bring him back to the ship, a bottle of beer tucked into his back pocket. But instead of bringing him back he ended up just sat next to Gavin in silence, his legs over the edge of the crater, counting the meteors that buzzed down through the atmosphere in the distance.

"I used to make movies. Back home," Gavin said quietly after a while. "Me and a couple of other guys. We were pretty good, y'know... Well, kind of."

Geoff didn't know what to say to this so he said nothing, instead taking his warmed bottle of beer and handed it to Gavin, squinting against the sun.

Gavin turned to look at him as he took the beer, saying, "You would have liked them," before leaning across the hot air between them and kissing Geoff once on the mouth, before pulling away and taking a sip from the bottle like nothing had happened.

Geoff sat stock still and counted out six beats by the thud of blood in his ears, before he opened his mouth to speak. But Gavin sighed and continued, "It's just, it's just that I never expected to go from that. To this." Gavin smiled and looked pointedly out across the crater, "It was fun once. Right?"

 

That night they stayed there by the crater because the desert was empty and kind of safe, in a 'we might be crushed by space debris' kind of way. But the main reason was that Geoff couldn't be bothered to try and get past the asteroid belt on the way back out. Not without at least one night of sleep.

Gavin had taken to wandering around in just his jeans since they had arrived on Earth, saying that it was just the way they rolled down here. "What, shirtless?" Geoff had said. And Gavin had grinned somewhat sheepishly and said quickly, "And I broke the aircon again" before offering Geoff a drink.

Without the aircon the ship was pretty unbearable, even in the middle of a midnight desert as they were then. Geoff stood, completely pressed against the main window in the living quarters, trying to soak up the cold from outside. Even though the window was way too thick for him to really feel anything other than just his own reflected heat. He watched the meteors burning across the night sky like fireworks, the black desert all around them. When he heard Gavin banging around he looked at the reflection of the room behind him, as Gavin wandered in. Geoff watched as he sat by an old food crate and started to take his handgun apart, laying out all the pieces and then putting them back together as fast as he could.

"Geoff, look," Gavin said, throwing one of Geoff's books at him. "Geoff, look! Look how fast I can do this now."

Geoff watched as Gavin slid the parts of the handgun together, the metal clicks echoing sharply off of the room's high walls. And when he finished he tapped the handle of the gun against the crate, pointing the gun at Geoff, "Pretty bloody good, huh?"

Geoff nodded sleepily, "You realise you could practise that forever but you'll never be as fast as me?"

"Hey, fuck you," Gavin stood up and walked over to Geoff until he was close enough to press the barrel of the gun into Geoff's chest. "Speed doesn't mean anything, not when I'm the best shooter anyway."

Geoff looked down at Gavin, ready to give him some witty comeback, but once again found himself counting out the heavy beats of his heart before he felt it was ok to speak. He watched as the moment slid slowly out of his control, as Gavin tucked the handgun into the waistband of his jeans and pressed against Geoff, hugging his arms around his middle.

"Gavin, look-" Geoff was suddenly very aware of the solid surface of the window behind him, how there was nowhere to escape.

"It's ok, right? Geoff, it’s cool," Gavin said, reaching up with one hand to touch Geoff's jaw. Geoff tried to pull away, lifting his head. But Gavin just put his fingers on the long taut line of Geoff's neck.

"I don't want this, Gavin," Geoff put his hands on Gavin's hips, feeling the bulk of the hand gun there. "Really. If you thought-"

Gavin leant against Geoff and let out one long breath, his fingers finding the dip under Geoff's ear and lingering there. He was silent as Geoff felt for the gun near his hip, as he pulled it free and pressed it firmly to the underside of Gavin's jaw. Pulling back the hammer as his free hand curled around Gavin's hip, holding him still.

"I don't want this," Geoff said again, watching as Gavin swallowed nervously. Ignoring Gavin's cock half hard against his leg. "It'll fuck everything up."

Gavin swallowed again and looked up at Geoff, "Are you going to shoot me then? Because you can. If you want. You can do whatever you want." This time Geoff didn't try to pull away when Gavin reached for him, pulling Geoff's head down as they kissed. "I'm yours," Gavin said quietly, and then said nothing more.

 

When they started doing bigger jobs, more complicated jobs, bounty hunters inevitably started coming after them. Which Geoff had never had before because really, he was pretty small time. It wasn't such a big deal, they had never been shown on Big Shot and they certainly didn't have any efficient bounty hunters after them. "The level of the hunter is only relative to the bounty," Geoff had said to Gavin as they sat, mildly inebriated on the deck of The Project one night. "And we're a pretty shitty bounty."

So no, it wasn't really a big deal. It was just that life was more of a struggle when you were on the run all the time. It was just that little bit harder.

And despite the fact that Geoff figured they would never be big enough to have Spike Spiegel after them, Gavin started to get this weird obsession with the Bebop, and sometimes when they fucked he would say, "Fuck, pretend... pretend you've caught me. Pretend I'm a criminal." And Geoff would think, Well, you are a fucking criminal. But he wouldn't say it because Gavin would let Geoff push him hard into the bed when they fucked like that. He let him cuff his hands to the line of pipes that ran along the wall and made Geoff tell him he was bad, "You're so fucking bad." And Geoff didn't want to ruin that.

Gavin spoke about it like he was so sure they were above all of that. The bounty hunters and the witnesses and the botched jobs, that stupid fucking Big Shot programme. Geoff's plans were too perfect and they worked together too well. They were just too good to be caught.

But then, of course, they inadvertently destroyed a government building when they were trying to escape some idiot fucking bounty hunter who was attempting to catch them with explosives. Trapping him inside and running for their lives as the building came crashing down behind them. And even though it hadn't really been their fault, that was considered an act of terrorism, that was fucking big time.

Geoff could have counted all the reasons why they were fucked but Gavin was looking at him like it was the best day of his life, so he just tried to ignore it.

 

"That's a good picture of you, man," Gavin said, pointed at the mug shot on the screen. "You look good."

"Yeah, thanks."

Gavin sat back on the sofa and watched as the Big Shot hosts reeled off their crimes, "Do you think that blonde girl is out of my league?"

Geoff laughed, "You're famous now, aren't you? No one's out of your league."

 

Almost three months later Gavin had taken his racer, saying he was going to find the Bebop, before they found The Project. He said he had to see it, just once. Just fucking once.

And Geoff had said no, that he wasn't going to go because it was fucking stupid and that they would just end up getting killed. That the only safe place in the whole damn solar system was his own ship and there was no way he was leaving it.

So as Geoff sat in the cargo hold of the Bebop, his hands cuffed behind his back, he wondered how the fuck Spike had got onto his ship, how the fuck it had ended up like this.

He knew that they hadn't caught Gavin because Geoff could hear the Big Shot broadcasts from wherever they watched them on the Bebop, and Gavin's name came up as 'wanted' every day before they got back to Mars, before they handed Geoff in.

Maybe he'll come and break me out, Geoff thought later, lying on the floor of his cell and staring up at the white ceiling, trying to ignore the buzzing in his ears. Geoff thought about telling Gavin he was bad, he thought about Gavin making home movies back on Earth, he thought about his quick shooting. All the non-static of his life.

"It's not a life of crime," Gavin had said to him once, downing the remainder of a beer and bumping his shoulder against Geoff's. "It's an extended period of unlawful adventure."

Geoff had smiled and bumped Gavin back, saying, "When they catch you, be sure to tell them that."

"They'll never catch me."

"You reckon."

"I fucking know it," Gavin leant up and kissed the corner of Geoff’s mouth. He waited until Geoff smiled down at him incredulously before saying quietly, "You and me, Ramsey."


End file.
